Time to Dump Time Zones • Hacker News Board

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#381

Post by tajen » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:00 AM UTC

trjordan wrote: post #271

darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

Perhaps Hackers News is the wrong audience to suffer this problem, but coordinating meetings between companies (i.e., sales calls) is a mess. When a call winds down and you've got two people on the phone coordinating their calendars, there's this hilarious, awkward dance that happens. "Great, sounds like we have a plan. When should we touch base again?" "Let's aim for Monday. How's your afternoon?" "Monday is no good…

http://www.worldtimebuddy.com shows a very visual representation that could be helpful to you.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#382

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:00 AM UTC

jwhitlark wrote: post #270

maxerickson wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was more in the second para, that 12 hour clocks aren't a platonic ideal, they are likely a result of practical demands. We make 12 hour dials rather than having them thrust upon us.

James Burke said in one of his shows that the 12 hour clock came in because it was ridiculous to have clock tower bells strike 24.

I was wondering what the rationale was.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#383

Post by Nition » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:10 AM UTC

m_eiman wrote: post #375

grzm wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISO, and many places, yes, but not everywhere. Is it necessary to add "At least in the civilized world"? Seems unnecessarily inflammatory. And the gp is proposing a new system anyway.

The point was that the proposal is based on assumptions that don't hold true in ever culture, but would be forced onto those cultures if it were implemented. This is of course true for most, if not all, proposals for changing the way we handle time. According to Wikipedia there are at least three "first day of the week" in use, sorted by (my assumption of) affected population: Monday: EU and most of other European co…

Wikipedia says the first day of the week in New Zealand is Monday, but our calendars usually start on Sunday and personally at least, I've always thought of Sunday as the first day of the week. So I'm not sure I'd trust that page too well.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#384

Post by seszett » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:17 AM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #341

jhbadger wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are joking, but the French revolutionaries really tried to introduce 10 hour days (with a different value of "hour" obviously) broken into 100 minutes each (again not our minute) along with their new calendar.

They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. I've run into a couple people who still support the concept. I know one ardent atheist who doesn't like that we name days after Norse gods. Similarly, when I lived in the middle east some chuckled at the concept of an Islamic nation using pagan names on calenders. They don't want a 10-hour day, but both want to break from the old dogma.

> They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays.

That was just an added bonus for the democratically elected Parliament to accept it, but it wasn't the initial reason.

Decimal time had mostly been pushed by mathematicians (d'Alembert decades before the Revolution, Borda who was the real ), and much later Poincaré, while the most important proponents of the decimal calendar were Romme and Dupuis (very far from being an atheist! though not a fervent Catholic either indeed) and respected scientists such as Lagrange and Monge.

The first and foremost reason was doing away with old arbitrary customs associated with the monarchy and replacing them with standards grounded into more universal, less arbitrary references.

That's the only reason I support it, for my part, and I doubt anyone in France cares now about having weekdays named after Roman gods. Even at the time of the Revolution I believe these names would actually have been somewhat appealing, as classical culture was seen then as a model with which to replace the despised monarchy and religious oppression.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#385

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:18 AM UTC

acqq wrote: post #142

majewsky wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his error is in assuming that the zenith should correspond to the midway point of your workday. Which is entirely not true: Our society is organized around getting to work first thing in the morning, and having some sunlight left after work hours for social activities.

I see even bigger error in his argument based on when "the Sun comes up" since it's dependent on the latitude even in the same time zone. He should ask somebody living close to the North pole. http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/longestday... "Reykjavik, Iceland Earliest Sunrise: 2:55 a.m. from June 18th through June 21st." (Reykjavik is 64° N) "London, United Kingdom Earliest Sunrise: 4:43 a.m. from Ju…

When I lived in London the seasonal variation in sunrise was just one of those things you lived with.

Everyone gets wrenched by the start and end of BST, but generally if someone says "5pm" or "17:00" you get a seasonal sense of how much daylight that implies. I can't imagine the US - or anywhere else - being different, except possibly close to the poles.

Absolute sun position matters a lot less than the felt relationship between clock time and sun position. That sense changes slowly but reliably over the year.

The obvious benefit of time zones is that virtually everyone you interact with daily has the same subjective time sense. Everyone knows that midday is going to be bright, midnight is going to be dark, and the rest is going to vary with the season.

A single universal time would lose that.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#386

Post by tom_mellior » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:25 AM UTC

imron wrote: post #258

darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

Let's look at the single data point we have where this sort of system is in place - China. It's approximately as wide as the U.S. and it has a single timezone - Beijing time. As you can imagine, if you are living in Beijing, Beijing time works pretty well. It also works pretty well for everywhere else on the east coast. It's not so bad in the middle either. For the people living in Urumqi, or even further west such a…

> Everything is offset a couple of hours

So? The only examples the article gives are "sometimes it's light at midnight" and "sometimes the sun doesn't come up until 10am", both of which are absolutely normal for lots of people living in, say, not-entirely-southern Scandinavia.

> and there is a kind of unofficial 'xinjiang time' that you have to convert to and from in your head

So the problem is not the single time zone, the problem stems from having two time zones for (somewhat understandable, but still inconvenient) political reasons.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#387

Post by filmor » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:25 AM UTC

Asooka wrote: post #379

Houshalter wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday. But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all? Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. T…

Having Sunday as the first day would mess up our week, because we call Tuesday, Thursday and Friday second, fourth and fifth respectively. If you really want 1st each month to be first day of week, either America will have to adopt Monday as first, or vary the day of week by region.

Wednesday is called "Mittwoch" in German, which is a shortened form of "middle of the week". Only works if Sunday is the first day of the week, though the common convention is also having the week start on Monday. Confused me quite a bit as a child :)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#388

Post by bench_soup » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:25 AM UTC

bluejekyll wrote: post #160

minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the mon…

You can start using the 'calendrier pataphysique' :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_cale...

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#389

Post by CalRobert » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:30 AM UTC

cheiVia0 wrote: post #295

mjevans wrote: post #12

As this version of the thread seems to have more points I'll comment here. I completely agree with everyone using UTC for numeric time numbering. I DISAGREE, with remapping 'noon', 'midnight', 'morning', etc. All of the relative descriptions for when in the local solar day a thing is should be approximate local references. An example: 'lunch' and 'noon' would still be the time in the middle of the local solar day tha…

When you eat lunch (or if you eat it at all) is completely cultural. It should not be used for encoding time.

I remember being pleased to see I'm not the only person who thinks three meals are usually unnecessary; I recently read this about the life of the Kumeyaay in southern California; they evidently prefer two meals a day.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7398826-indians-of-the-oa...

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#390

Post by tom_mellior » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 9:32 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means.

Do you really? If your friend called, said "I woke up at 9 this morning", then hung up, you wouldn't really know what that means.

Usually your friend would embed this information in some context, like "I woke up at 9 this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 9:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." You need this amount of context to understand what they are really trying to tell you, and you wouldn't keep track of your friends' schedules and commute times at this level of detail.

But if the context is provided, the actual number doesn't matter: "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 22:30, and my commute takes at least 30 minutes even on the best days. Oops." conveys exactly the same information.

More generally, my colleagues and me might come in to work at any time between 8 and 10 in the morning, and I guess (but don't check!) that that's the same for my friends in other companies. So if a random friend tells me "I woke up at 9 this morning", they could mean anything between "... and I realized I would be at work two hours later than usual" and "... so I would have time to feed the ducks in the park on the way to work and still be at the office before the boss".